Sylvari Week Begins!

When it comes to fashioning a fantasy character for oneself, I've always gravitated towards shape shifters and nature-born creatures. I especially have a fascination with and love for shapeshifters who would fashion their clothing, weapons, and really any required tool, from their own forms. It's not just the idea of it that intrigues me, its the visual application. How does the transition look, how does something flow from one form to another, and where does it stop?

I used to doodle shapeshifters half-way between two forms, shifted just enough to facilitate whatever new need had taken them. The efficiency of life tends to work that way, after all. Life is rather lazy when it comes right down to it, and in that laziness you can find an elegant efficiency.

Unfortunately, technical limitations usually keep that sort of cool fluidity out of our games. One model will be replaced wholesale by another with some sort of obscuring visual effect such as an explosion of particle effects. However, what if a life form spent all its days on the knife's edge between two different forms? That would require no extra technical trickery. That could happily live in a game, but in our catering to technical limitations, many of us have forgotten how to creatively blend two disparate forms into one organic and cohesive whole.

Kristen Perry hasn't.

What she's done with the Sylvari is exquisite and dare I say it feels natural, alive. When tasked with creating a humanoid plant race, she looked not just at the superficial: leaves, bark, vines. She also look at how plants form. How to they grow and come into being, and what visual effects would that growth have on the creature?

The end result is a break from the unending stream of elven races that wear plant clothing. Instead of wearing leaves, the Sylvari clearly grow them.

We've been waiting a while for ANet to reveal the Sylvari redesign, but for this fan, at least, the wait was worth it.